Friday, May 18, 2007

Winds of War: Marx and Islamic Fundamentalists - Partners in Crime?

The ties between Marxism and Islamism are not just political. It’s almost spiritual. Theodore Dalrymple, author of the book Life at the Bottom observes the comparison between the socialist left and fundamental Islam with these observations on Karl Marx and Muslim philosopher of jihad Sayyid Qutb.

Qutb’s thought has many parallels with Marxism. Where Marx has Historical Inevitability, Qutb has God‘s Law. Marx, you remember, envisages a time when the state will wither away and history will end. In Marx’s vision, political power will have dissolved, and the exploitation of man by man will have ceased, to be replaced by the mere administration of things. (How anybody of minimal intelligence could have believed such a thing beats me.) In Qutb’s vision, all political power will have dissolved, replaced by man’s spontaneous obedience to God’s law. Just as the administration of things in Marx’s utopia will not confer power on the administrators, presumably because everything will be so plentiful that no one will be tempted to appropriate more than the next man, so in Qutb’s utopia no one will have to interpret the law and gain power from doing so. God’s law will be as evident as thing will be abundant in Marx’s classless society.

In both Marx and Qutb, the idea is expressed that, under the new dispensation, man will become more human, less animal. Personally, I have always found this kind of thought an appallingly arrogant slur on all the people who have lived before the thinker of it: does humanity really have to wait for Marx and Qutb before it becomes truly human?

OK. So far both philosophies, though out in la la land, are not necessarily threatening. But the ideologies don’t stop there.

Marx understood that the classless society could not come about by merely preaching socialism, as if it were merely an ethical demand or theory. Violence would be necessary. Similarly, Qutb denies that the world will become Islamic merely by preaching the word of God. He refers to Mohammed’s Meccan period, when the Prophet did not resort to arms. This, he says, was merely tactical; it would have been impossible in practice to impose his rule by force.But when he went to Medina, he had no hesitation in fighting his enemies, including those who simply did not accept his message.

This last piece explains very well what kind of philosophers Marx and Qutb really were.

Both Marx and Qutb are full of hatred. Of course, Qutb would have claimed to be nothing more than a humble instrument of God, expressing God’s design for humanity, just as Marx would have claimed that he was merely the mouthpiece of historical inevitability. But all is not humility that claims to be humble.

Qutb’s philosophy of Islam begins where Marx ends.

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